“Say, they’re all bully; but this is the bullissimus one of the lot.  It goes like this: 

              “’There was a young maid of Sorrento,
                Who said to her—­’”

I have regretted ever since that at this juncture I came to and so failed to get the rest of it.  I’ll bet that was a peach of a limerick.  It started off so promisingly.

Chapter XXIII

Muckraking in Old Pompeii

It now devolves on me as a painful yet necessary duty to topple from its pedestal one of the most popular idols of legendary lore.  I refer, I regret to say, to the widely famous Roman sentry of old Pompeii.

Personally I think there has been entirely too much of this sort of thing going on lately.  Muckrakers, prying into the storied past, have destroyed one after another many of the pet characters in history.  Thanks to their meddlesome activities we know that Paul Revere did not take any midnight ride.  On the night in question he was laid up in bed with inflammatory rheumatism.  What happened was that he told the news to Mrs. Revere as a secret, and she in strict confidence imparted it to the lady living next door; and from that point on the word traveled with the rapidity of wildfire.

Horatius never held the bridge; he just let the blamed thing go.  The boy did not stand on the burning deck, whence all but him had fled; he was among the first in the lifeboats.  That other boy —­the Spartan youth—­did not have his vitals gnawed by a fox; the Spartan youth had been eating wild grapes and washing them down with spring water.  Hence that gnawing sensation of which so much mention has been made.  Nobody hit Billy Patterson.  He acquired his black eye in the same way in which all married men acquire a black eye—­by running against a doorjamb while trying to find the ice-water pitcher in the dark.  He said so himself the next day.

Even Barbara Frietchie is an exploded myth.  She did not nail her country’s flag to the window casement.  Being a female, she could not nail a flag or anything else to a window.  In the first place, she would have used a wad of chewing gum and a couple of hairpins.  In the second place, had she recklessly undertaken to nail up a flag with hammer and nails, she would never have been on hand at the psychological moment to invite Stonewall Jackson to shoot her old gray head.  When General Jackson passed the house she would have been in the bathroom bathing her left thumb in witch-hazel.

Furthermore, she did not have any old gray head.  At the time of the Confederate invasion of Maryland she was only seventeen years old—­some authorities say only seven—­and a pronounced blonde.  Also, she did not live in Frederick; and even if she did live there, on the occasion when the troops went through she was in Baltimore visiting a school friend.  Finally, Frederick does not stand where it stood in the sixties.  The cyclone of 1884 moved it three miles back into the country and twisted the streets round in such a manner as to confuse even lifelong residents.  These facts have repeatedly been proved by volunteer investigators and are not to be gainsaid.